Notes

1] See Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), I, 196-204, for a scholarly edition, heavily annotated, that gives two versions of the poem: the first, titled "The Doomed City" (from the 1831 edition), and the second (as above, from the 1845 edition). Back to Line

2] a strange city: identified by Mabbott as the ruins of Biblical Gomorrah on the Red Sea (cf. line 48), but this association is at odds with the location, "within the dim West" (3). Back to Line

18] Babylon-like walls: ancient Chaldee city on the Euphrates, the capital of Nebuchadnezzar and the doomed city of the book of Revelation (17). Back to Line

51] hence,: "hence." in 1845, but corrected in the 1850 edition, Works (1850), II: 35-36. Back to Line